Supreme Court Decision

I’m happy to report I “won” my recent case before the Ohio Supreme Court. I put “won” in quotation marks because the Court did not make a decision on the merits. It concluded what I had believed from the time it first accepted jurisdiction of the appeal–that this was not the appropriate case to decide the proposition of law the appellant proposed. After all of the briefing and the oral arguments before the Court, it simply concluded, “This cause, here on appeal from the Court of Appeals for Warren County, was considered in the manner prescribed by law. On further consideration thereof, this cause is dismissed, sua sponte, as having been improvidently accepted.” So, the decision of the Court of Appeals stands, and my client wins.

I think the Court realized this case presented complications that made it a poor vehicle for deciding the question presented–not the least of which is the fact that the trial court made a factual finding it was impossible for my client to fulfill the terms of the contempt citation against her. The Court could not very well send her to jail for failing to do something she was absolutely unable to do, in the course of deciding a rather arcane legal issue that did not have to be decided to do justice in this case.